Tuesday, September 13, 2005

Beofre SAWB can get up here and tell us all that these people have anything to do with liberal thought, I'll take a page out of the neo-con playbook and launch a pre-emptive strike. Against people like Galloway, Ensler and Fonda.

These folks are pretty much scum.

Now, out of the three, Fonda is by far the most naive and least destructive. It is only a testament to the place of beautiful women in culture that she was ever a starlet, and a case of culture backlash that she is still garnering headlines. The worst thing one can do to her is ignore her and change the channel. Fade away, honey.

Then there is this Eve Ensler chick who pretty much eptiomizes the place where feminism should loathe to go. What used to be a vast movement based on equal rights, equal pay and equla justice has been usurped by Me First and the Gimmie Gimmeies. Feminism weeps if this is what its come to. Hell, she takes all the femininity out of the belief structure, and she won't look people in the eyes when speaking to them. That suggests to me a lack of confidence that can only come with spewing lies. I don't give a crap about her silly book. If this is what women are supposed to aspire to, no wonder "feminism" has become a dirty word.

Then there is Galloway. If anyone, anyone on the left is wondering why people who agree with us continue to walk away it is because folks like him have our microphone. Well, here's the lesson kids, and I realized this last night when my Moms looked me straight in the eye and told me I wasn't really a liberal.

We on the left are not attaching to these people to further our causes, they are attaching to us to increase their relevancy. We need to garner up a housecleanin,' folks. We need to retake our legacy: liberalism is based in the belief structrues of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Harriet Tubman, Franklin Roosevelt, Susan B. Anthony. We walk in the paths made by giants, when will we act like it? By God we've got to get our microphone back.

5 comments:

As you stress these folks are not liberals, please inform me as to what the git has done (besides being opposed to Gulf War II) that might confuse him as one? Please restrict yourself to short, affirmative sentences as my brain hurts from law.

And come mid-December explain me under what rubric you deem Washington and Tubman liberal; it's not that I disagree, I just don't understand.

I can't speak to the first to the first part of your comment; since I don't actually understand it. (My ignorance, not yours, I'm sure.) No idea who or what the git is. However, I can help with the second bit -- you don't even have to wait till mid-December for Pat to do it.

While I couldn't find it written anywhere in red letters, (that's an etymology joke for Kevin alone) I did find a couple definitions for Liberal, from a fairly definitive source, which make Pat's point nicely.

the OED defines Liberal as:"Free from narrow prejudice; open-minded, candid ... esp. Free from bigotry or unreasonable prejudice in favour of traditional opinions or established institutions; open to the reception of new ideas or proposals of reform." also "Of political opinions: Favourable to constitutional changes and legal or administrative reforms tending in the direction of freedom or democracy."

The first would aptly cover Tubman with her zeal for liberty; the second, Washington, who did, after all, lead a democratic revolution.

But, even without a fancy dictionary, surely we can go back to our basic Carrithers explanation: Liberal, in the oldest sense, means in support of change and Conservative in support of the status quo.

To answer the first question: the 'git' Galloway has attached himself to the left just by hollering loudly until the country paid attention to him. Then other "anti-war" folks like to parade him around as "evidence" that "reasonable people" exist in other countries. Ensler wrote a bestseller, so did Fonda. He's on tour with them as part of the "anti-war movement." The left has also not stood up and said "this guy sucks" because the left seems to feel that it is better to have any voices go against the machine in lieu of having a real and coherent message.

Why would Washington and Tubman not be considered liberals? They were some of the original liberals, at least in the American sense. They were there when the pantheon got together and decided that the fight for noble ideals such as human liberty, justice and the fight to make things better was worth their own lives.

That's liberalism. Spotted owls and saving whales can wait.

As to Fonda and treason. My belief is this. During the Vietnam war in this country (roughly 1956 to 1978) we were engaged in both a shooting foreign war as well as a simmering domestic civil war concerning both civil rights and the foreign shooting war.

Concerning civil wars, motives and methods do not matter. When a country is so polarized, it becomes necessary, at the cessation of hostilities, to conduct livlihoods and business and commerce with one another, otherwise, hostilities would never actually cease. We do this in the Western world and parts of the East (American Revolution style vs French Revolution style) very sucessfully. This is the reason we don't have very much ethnic cleansing here in the United States.

Why was Jane Fonda not shot for treason? The same reason English citizens who fought the Continental Army were not deprived of property or their lives once the dust had settled in Yorktown. The same reason Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis were not executed at the end of April 1865. The same reason George Wallace was not shot down in the schoolhouse door while facing down troops. Its the same reason we don't arrest and try Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and James Dobson for treason because they want to replace the 10 Amendments with the 10 Commandments.

For good or ill, we are a country born and made strong by rebellions. We are made strong by our oppositions to decsions that our government makes. I think that, as a society, we recognize this, no matter how bad your transgression committed while in rebellion.

Not that I agree with all of that, or the consequences of allowing such, but the alternative is to become Rwanda or Serbia, so I will live with Jane Fonda, (and Robertson, Falwell and Dobson) running around and not loose too much sleep.